A university thesis comes with a convenient stopping point. Submit it, collect the degree, move on. Svanika Balasubramanian and Peter Wang Hjemdahl had reached that point at Wharton. They had spent months studying Mumbai's informal recycling economy. There was a paper to show for it, and the prospect of careers elsewhere. There were also people still doing the work they had been studying. Graduation could settle the academic obligation. It was less useful for settling that one.
Balasubramanian had already tried the familiar business-school route, with summer analyst roles at Deloitte Middle East and Morgan Stanley in New York. Her original research concerned refugee resettlement and immigration in Germany. Hjemdahl, assigned as her peer reviewer, was studying women working in Mumbai's waste economy. Their interests converged. They decided to write together. Eventually, the project became rePurpose, with fellow Penn student Aditya Siroya joining as a co-founder.
The detail that makes this beginning worth keeping is the peer review. A routine academic arrangement put two people into conversation, and the conversation acquired responsibilities neither had planned. The syllabus had rather exceeded its brief.
A view that followed her home
At Deonar in Mumbai, Balasubramanian and Hjemdahl stood on a mountain of rubbish roughly 30 feet high. Waste stretched in one direction; the city's skyline rose in another. The two economies were close enough to see together. Connecting them on fairer terms would occupy the founders for years.
Workers known as kabadiwalas were already collecting household scrap, sorting materials and selling them onward. They understood how to find value in what other people had discarded. But working individually left them with little bargaining power when selling to larger recyclers. The founders began with that practical imbalance: a functioning trade whose participants did not share equally in its rewards.
Oman, India, and the people doing the work
Born in India and raised in Oman, Balasubramanian grew up in a family with a history of activism. She became interested in what business could contribute to work she cared about: how to give an initiative the resources to keep operating, and how to expand it beyond the reach of an individual effort. Economics at Wharton offered a way to investigate those questions.
Her concern with overlooked workers also found an outlet in reporting. As a 2018 Pulitzer Center student fellow, she investigated the lives of Indian migrant workers in the Middle East. She returned to a region she knew from childhood with different questions, concentrating on women employed in domestic work and the structures governing their opportunities.
Her reporting in Oman included conversations with workers, social advocates and officials. Published in 2019, it examined recruitment arrangements, employment restrictions and the distance between a promise of work and the conditions someone might encounter on arrival. The story followed relationships and incentives, including the intermediaries between a worker and an employer.
There is a connection between that reporting and her company, though the settings differ. In each, the person providing an essential service can become the least visible participant. Understanding the system requires spending time with that person. The international business discussion gets more complicated once the people inside it have names.
The first idea was a marketplace
In 2018, rePurpose was presented as a digital marketplace for recyclable waste. It would connect households, collectors and recycling businesses. A buyer looking for ordinary goods generally knows where to shop. Someone looking for recyclable scrap faces a more scattered market. The founders wanted to make those transactions easier to arrange.
Balasubramanian and Hjemdahl won Penn's 2018 President's Engagement Prize, which provided $100,000 for implementation and a $50,000 living stipend for each recipient. That gave them the means to work on the project after graduation. Their proposed Mumbai rollout included 1,500 households, 150 kabadiwalas and 10 recyclers. Those were starting plans, with the uncertainty that belongs to starting plans.
Make the connections easier. Improve the economics for the people collecting the material.
The proposition was specific enough to test. Could better connections improve earnings? Could more material reach buyers? Could a digital service help an existing network operate more efficiently? Environmental ambition had become a set of transactions, with practical questions attached to each one.
Finding someone to pay for recovery
Over time, the company developed a plastic-credit model, taking inspiration from carbon markets. Individuals and businesses could finance the recovery of plastic waste corresponding to their own plastic footprint. This brought another participant into the equation: a company prepared to pay for collection that otherwise lacked adequate funding.
The approach put financing alongside the physical task of moving material. A brand could support a recovery project without becoming a waste operator itself. Local partners could receive funding for work on the ground. The relationship depended on measuring the material and explaining what the payment supported.
By March 2020, the three founders appeared together in Forbes' profile of rePurpose Global, associated with its 30 Under 30 recognition. The business was funding recovery projects across six countries. A venture that had begun with questions about transactions in Mumbai was now trying to connect consumer businesses with waste recovery across borders.
That expansion also brought a harder communication problem. A recovery claim concerns a particular activity and quantity of material. Keeping its meaning clear matters, especially when consumers see a short claim on a package rather than the longer account of the project behind it.
A practical argument for imperfect progress
Balasubramanian has written about the difficulty of acting when every available intervention has limitations. In an essay first published in 2021, she described being at her family's farm in Coimbatore, surrounded by trees nurtured over decades, while groundwater had fallen and crop failures had become a recurring concern. The problem was close to home.
Her response was to argue for more careful public discussion of environmental action. Simple stories can make a solution look complete or make an incomplete solution look useless. Both readings can obscure the work of comparing outcomes. She called for independent ways to assess interventions and for people working in separate parts of sustainability to cooperate.
She included herself in the argument. A founder whose company receives support from brands has interests of her own. Acknowledging those interests leaves room to ask better questions about results. Readers can examine an intervention without treating either its commercial backing or its good intentions as the final answer.
It is a demanding position because it offers little shelter in certainty. The work still has to be judged. The evidence still has to improve. Meanwhile, material continues to arrive, and workers continue to need a viable market for handling it.
The customer who sent extra money
Some of her descriptions of company life are less grand and more revealing. Early on, a client attached an additional check to a quarterly payment, explaining that the service was worth more than the amount charged. The client voluntarily doubled the payment. Founders spend considerable time proving that customers value their work. This customer had supplied an unusually agreeable piece of evidence.
Balasubramanian has also described the difficulty of delegation. “I love being in the weeds,” she said. Building things herself was enjoyable; doing it all could keep her from deciding where the company should go next. She pointed to learning from other industries as another useful correction to the instinct that every problem required an original solution.
Her account leaves room for ordinary frustrations. Opportunity costs occupy her attention: choosing one use of limited time and money means postponing another. Her inbox remains a recurring problem. The organization may work across continents; the unread messages still assemble in one place.
“I love being in the weeds.”
Svanika Balasubramanian, on learning to delegate
The bottle deserves another turn
Her interest in circularity reaches beyond collecting discarded material. In a discussion about reuse and refill, she used the example of a shampoo bottle: a durable container that could hold more shampoo after its first contents run out. Sending it straight into the recycling chain can cut short a useful life.
But a refill system has to fit the life of the shopper as well as the life of the bottle. Price, convenience and the availability of places to refill all matter. The proposal asks brands, retailers and policymakers to design arrangements together. A consumer's willingness cannot provide the whole infrastructure.
This is where her work returns to its original interest in connections. A reusable package, like a pile of recyclable scrap, needs a route to the next participant. The quality of that route affects whether the idea survives contact with an ordinary shopping trip.
A different chair, the same unfinished problem
On January 28, 2026, Balasubramanian announced that Manika Doshi, rePurpose's Chief Operating Officer, would become CEO. Balasubramanian moved into the role of Co-Founder and Chief Circularity Officer, focusing on longer-term innovation, partnerships and policy advocacy. The company had launched its Packaging Compliance software platform the previous year.
Cumulative plastic waste recovered across 11 countries, reported in the leadership-transition announcement.
Her new remit includes supporting emerging entrepreneurs through the Innovation Alliance for a Global Plastics Treaty, where she is a co-convener. It also encompasses the effort to connect packaging design, production, consumption and recovery. Each stage carries decisions that shape what becomes possible at the next.
The title change gives her more time for the questions that drew her into the business. A company can grow, appoint a new chief executive and add software, while its founder keeps returning to the arrangements between people. Who has a buyer? Who can finance the work? Who gets heard when the rules are written?
Years earlier, she and a peer reviewer had a thesis ready to submit. They could describe the recycling economy they had studied. They chose to keep working inside the problem. The paper had an ending. Their involvement has proved rather less tidy.